Urban suburbia: More local businesses are catering to suburban tastes

INDOOR-OUTDOOR: Kletz and Shustik's commercial play space was inspired by their childhood in Great Neck, Long Island.

Published: January 16, 2018 - 12:01 am

Like many New Yorkers, Joel Kim Booster comes from somewhere else. The 29-year-old was raised in Plainfield, Ill., where the Chicago suburbs peter out into endless corn and soybean fields. In 2013 Booster, a stand-up comedian, joined the great migration from the suburbs, settling in Williamsburg so he could work the city’s clubs. He has recently appeared on Conan and Comedy Central Stand-up Presents and has become a devoted Brooklyner.

“I am a card-carrying leftist progressive who shops local, thinks corporations are bad and has burned Jeff Bezos in effigy almost nightly,” he quipped.

But like many new arrivals to the city, Booster sometimes appreciates a reminder of where he came from. For that he goes to the Target at the Atlantic Terminal mall, developed in 2004 by Forest City Ratner.

“It’s this giant public space where almost no one cares why you’re there, how long you’ve been there or if you plan on buying anything—a rare sanctuary in New York,” he said. Booster finds it reassuring that the Downtown Brooklyn store looks almost exactly the same as the one he patronized in high school.

Local blog F----d in Park Slope declared the Atlantic Terminal megastore was “truly an abomination,” but to Booster, the store symbolizes how far he’s come. Back in Plainfield, his family could afford only to shop at Walmart and Blain’s Farm & Fleet. Target was for the more financially comfortable and became the first place he would go when allowed to venture out as a teenager.

“It was a weird status symbol for me at that point in my life,” he recalled, “and that person is probably buried deep inside.”

Stories like Booster’s are a part of the fabric of New York, where about half of the 8.5 million residents hail from outside the city. Many come from suburbia, the latest players in a timeless story of ambitious young people leaving their hometown for the bright lights of the big city. But today many migrants from the suburbs are staying here much longer. Their presence is reshaping a city that in recent years has increasingly come to closely resemble the suburbs they left behind.

The spread of Target (there are 12 in the city) is one example. The first store in Brooklyn opened in 2002, and there are now five in the borough, including two that opened last year. Target’s sprawl is part of a broader trend in which chain retailers with roots in suburban shopping centers have grown by 35% in the city in the past decade. The fastest-growing restaurant locally for the past 10 years has been Dunkin’ Donuts, which has replaced the many independent deli, diner and café operators who succumbed to ever-rising rents.

Newcomers from suburbia are making their growing presence felt in other ways. Developers are building larger apartments to offer the space they’re accustomed to, while ride-hailing apps let them scoot—or slug—around the boroughs by car. Even the business of suburban-size private playgrounds is growing.

Buck Ennis

WHO MOWS THE UP YARD?: Chen specializes in apartments that feature suburban amenities.

“Years ago, when people left the suburbs for city living, it meant giving up the qualities of suburbia,” said Eran Chen, an architect who specializes in designing apartments that appeal to suburbanites’ tastes. “Now people realize they don’t need to make a choice like that.”

Reversal of fortunes

In the 1949 essay “Here Is New York,” E.B. White wrote that newcomers who choose the city “account for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts and its incomparable achievements.”

“Natives give it solidity and continuity,” he said of the city, “but the settlers give it passion.”

For decades afterward, migrants from suburban and small-town America would flock to New York and rent an apartment, usually in Manhattan. Typically they would stick around long enough to launch their career before returning to the land from whence they came, once schools and space became an issue. The city’s soaring crime rate and brush with bankruptcy in the 1970s accelerated the exodus, and between 1975 and 1980, 453,000 New Yorkers moved to the suburbs while only 130,000 suburbanites settled in the city, according to a report last year by the Department of City Planning. Since 2010, however, population flows between the city and suburbia have nearly equalized, and residents hailing from the nearby suburbs now represent a highest-on-record 21% of migrants. Newcomers from suburbs of other cities represent an additional but unquantified group, although 37% of city residents are from upstate or another state.

The influx of folks from places like Cos Cob, Conn., and Creve Coeur, Mo., is part of the reason the city’s population has shot up by 375,000—more people than live in Pittsburgh—in just the past eight years. Joining these mostly white, non-Hispanic suburbanites is an even bigger stream of arrivals from overseas. The city’s fastest-growing immigrant groups are from Bangladesh, China and Mexico, and about 40% of its 3 million foreign-born residents have arrived since 2000. Half of all residents speak a language other than English at home.

“New York City is arguably more multiracial and multiethnic than at any time in its history,” the city’s former Planning Commission director, Carl Weisbrod, said in a 2016 speech.

Still, because migrants from the suburbs tend to have more money than immigrants—the Federal Reserve’s 2016 consumer finance survey showed that the $61,200 median income for white households was 75% higher than that of black households and 58% higher than Hispanic ones—and more education, businesses are understandably eager to cater to the wants and needs of former suburbanites. That eagerness is remaking the city’s streetscape.

A defining feature of many suburban towns, the shopping mall, has ensconced itself in Manhattan at Chelsea Market, the Time Warner Center and most recently the Oculus, while adapting to its urban environment by shedding the parking lot. Last decade, Fairway introduced suburban-style supermarkets with wide aisles, big shopping carts and a vast array of fresh and prepared foods—a revelation to New Yorkers conditioned to dark, cramped Sloan’s. The first freestanding Chick-fil-A opened on West 37th Street three years ago to around-the-corner lines and is generating an impressive $13 million in annual revenue, on par with Balthazar. Chain coffee shops have grown by 65% in the past decade, fueled by Dunkin’ Donuts, Joe and Starbucks, while chain bakeries such as Le Pain Quotidien and Panera Bread have doubled their footprint, according to a report last month by the Center for an Urban Future. There are 24 total Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and BJ’s Wholesale Club outlets here, compared with nine in 2008.

Uber as baby driver

Other features of suburban life have become ubiquitous. Bike lanes, first laid out in a Sacramento suburb, now span 45 miles across Gotham, which added a record 18 miles in 2016 to serve the 778,000 New Yorkers who bike regularly—nearly 50% more than just five years ago. In addition, the average new condo in Manhattan has grown to nearly 1,600 square feet, 25% larger than a decade earlier, according to Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. The increase is driven by exceptionally wealthy buyers who can afford lots of space, and also by former suburbanites accustomed to some elbow room.

“The first wave of suburbanites were people attracted to urban environments, like artists, who had cultural capital but needed affordable housing and liked racially and culturally diverse environments,” said Christopher Niedt, a sociologist at Hofstra University and the academic director of its National Center for Suburban Studies. “The art they create attracts people who are less tolerant of diversity and want to create a more homogeneous environment.”

Ride-hailing apps are also popular with this cohort, which largely grew up in places without much public transportation. Uber and Lyft remind some customers of rides home with their parents or their parents’ friends because the driver always knows where to go and little communication is needed.

FACTS

8%Decline in NYC neighborhoods' population density since 1970

24Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and BJ's in the city, up from nine in 2008

37%Portion of New Yorkers who hail from upstate or another state

“You can depend on the car being there, kind of like depending on mom or dad,” said Eden Sutley, a 28-year-old TV producer from Lafayette, La., who lives in the East Village.

Then there’s Airbnb. Nicholas Colas, a Wall Street analyst who has tracked consumer trends for about 30 years, likens the home-sharing platform to that mainstay of suburban birthday parties, the sleepover, because it offers people the chance to visit the personal space of others. “A lot of the tech economy is focused on making city living comfortable for people who grew up in the suburbs,” Colas said.

At the same time, some suburbs are trying to keep young, educated people from fleeing to cities by making themselves more urban, such as by encouraging the development of apartments, retail and restaurants within walking distance of commuter rail stations. More than 500 luxury condos on Long Island have sold for $1 million in the past three years, according to research firm Miller Samuel. In the three years before that, fewer than 20 did.

“There’s concern that places like Long Island are becoming less appealing to millennials,” said Niedt. “It’s tricky. It’s not that millennials [as a whole] are leaving so much as white millennials.”

Grizzled New Yorkers have rolled their eyes at the so-called bridge-and-tunnel crowd for decades. But Eric Darton, a native Manhattanite and the author of a history of the World Trade Center, sees the suburbanization of the city in a more sympathetic light.

New York, he said, was intimidating when he was young because it was so dangerous. Today it is intimidating because the cost of living is so high. In Darton’s view, places like Target and Costco not only provide a service and a certain comfort to shoppers who grew up with them, but their growing presence also represents a collective act of defiance when so many apartments, restaurants and shops have become accessible only to the affluent.

“The city has become so generic and globalized that the suburbs feel more authentic,” he said. “Who would have ever thought that suburbs would stand for what’s distinctive? But that’s where we are.”

The great inversion

For a long time, New Yorkers have worried that suburban influence would drain the city of its character. In 2007 the founders of the magazine Designer/builder edited a book of essays called The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town? “Like the suburbs New Yorkers so long snubbed,” the editors wrote, “the city is becoming more private, more predictable and homogenized.”

The changes that concerned them dated back to the early 1990s, when New York and other cities began recovering the population and economic vitality they had been losing to the suburbs for about 40 years. Social scientists call the shift the great inversion. Others prefer the term gentrification.

Whatever it’s called, the development owes its existence to the collapse in crime. There were 2,245 murders in New York in 1990 but fewer than 300 in 2017. The city’s frightening past is now memorialized on shows like The Deuce, much to the amusement of those who lived through it.

“If you were out late with a group of friends, everyone called everyone else to make sure you got home safe,” recalled Francis Morrone, an architectural historian and a contributor to The Suburbanization of New York who moved to the city in 1980. “New York was certainly exciting then, but also terrifying. It was the city of Taxi Driver, and the question was: Why would you live here?”

As crime fell, New York recovered the 1.1 million residents who fled in the 1970s, plus a lot more. About 20 years ago, suburbanites whose vision of New York was informed by Friends and Sex and the City began flocking here. To house them, Mayor Michael Bloomberg rezoned industrial areas in Chelsea, Williamsburg and Greenpoint, paving the way for large apartment towers that often included large retail spaces on the ground floor or basement level. Mayor Bill de Blasio has rezoned parts of Long Island City and East New York, Brooklyn, and is looking to do the same in Inwood so more apartments can rise.

Even as the city’s population has grown, median density has decreased to 53,400 people per square mile, down from 57,900 in 1970, according to New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy. One reason is newcomers who used to seek out Manhattan are settling in less-crowded outer-borough neighborhoods, such as Flatbush and Sunset Park. “Many more neighborhoods are considered desirable than was the case a generation ago,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, director of the Furman Center.

The decline in density may also reflect the growing size of apartments. Chen, founder of architecture firm ODA New York, has made a big business out of building big. He has designed apartment buildings that sometimes resemble giant Jenga sets in such places as Union Square, Hunters Point and Gowanus that offer elements of suburban-style living. Amenities often include garden spaces, rooftop access and other common areas where neighbors can mingle like they would over a picket fence. Chen added that developers can charge 10% more for his apartments than a typical condo, or around $2,200 per square foot. A 2,300-square-foot two-bedroom at 15 Union Square West sold for nearly $5 million in October, according to StreetEasy. “People don’t want to give up the quality of life they had in the suburbs, and they’re willing to pay for that,” he said.

During the spring, construction is scheduled to begin on Chen’s next project, a tower at East 44th Street and First Avenue. The slender, 41-story structure will consist of a single 2,800-square-foot apartment on each floor. Units on higher floors will have direct access to a 1,400-square-foot private garden space above or below, offering 360-degree views. The garden will serve a similar function as a backyard, but, Chen said, “We call it the up yard or down yard.”

The kids are all right

SHOPPING AT THE CHAIN GANG

If it feels as if more and more chain stores are squeezing out your favorite neighborhood restaurants and shops, well, they are. In the past 10 years, the number of chain retailers operating in the city has grown by 35%, to 7,317, according to a report last month by the Center for an Urban Future.

The fastest-growing brand is MetroPCS, which has added 438 stores since 2008 and now has 445 throughout the five boroughs. Dunkin’ Donuts has added 271 stores in the past decade, for a total of 612, making it the most ubiquitous restaurant in town. And 7-Eleven has more than doubled its Gotham footprint, growing from 57 locations in 2008 to 140 today.

Interestingly, New York’s premier member of the chain gang is beating a bit of a retreat these days. Duane Reade, a fixture on street corners since it first opened on Broadway between Duane and Reade streets in 1960, closed 43 drugstores across the five boroughs last year, and its footprint has shrunk by nearly 20% since 2014. Duane Reade was acquired in 2010 by Walgreens, a brand that’s expanding in the city.

More Duane Reades may soon disappear. In an effort to fend off Amazon, Walgreens agreed last year to acquire about 2,000 Rite Aid locations for $4.4 billion. Once the deal is complete, management has said it will close up to 600 stores that it deems too close together.

In brighter chain news, Crumbs Bake Shop, a cupcake-maker that originated on the Upper West Side in 2003, has managed to rebound from its 2014 bankruptcy. New management opened a dozen local locations last year, bringing its total to 22, according to the Center for an Urban Future. —A.E.

Liat Kletz has also built a business centered on New Yorkers’ quest for a slice of suburbia. Three years ago she helped open The Playroom NYC, a 3,000-square-foot facility on the Upper East Side. For a $35 fee, parents can drop in any time so their children can play in a dress-up area called the Broadway Room, stack toy cans in the Bodega or frolic around a climbing structure big enough to fit on a schoolyard playground.

Kletz, whose email list has grown to 5,000 names, said she and her sister Tali Shustik wanted to bring to city residents the kind of life they had growing up in Great Neck, Long Island.

“As kids, we had our basement and a backyard where we could run around with ample space to play,” Kletz said. “Once we moved to the city and started our own families, we felt bad that our kids were not going to have the same experience we got in Long Island, but we knew we wanted to stay in the city.”

Suburbia’s siren call sounds even for migrants who have lived in New York much of their lives. After 25 years in the West Village, Janet Falk decided she wanted to have the sort of environment she had growing up in Hartsdale in Westchester County, where children in kindergarten through 12th grade went to school in the same building. Falk found what she was looking for on Roosevelt Island, where the speed limit is 15 miles per hour and she sees children playing outside unsupervised.

“That’s how I grew up,” Falk said, “and that’s how it should be.”

Annie Scranton says the Upper West Side provides nearly everything she misses about growing up five minutes from the beach in West Long Branch, N.J. Because she and her husband are renovating their apartment, they often visit the nearby Lowe’s home-improvement store, Manhattan’s first when it opened in 2015. (There are now two.) They also rent Citi Bikes and ride along the Hudson River path, stopping at places like the Pier I Café, where people hang out with their children and pets.

“It’s like the Jersey Shore without the sand,” said Scranton, president of Pace Public Relations.

Long ago E.B. White observed that every New Yorker was a block or two away from a newsstand; shoeshine shack; ice, coal and wood cellar; and a haberdasher. The TriBeCa of the 1990s feels just as distant to Katrina Lenček-Inagaki, a contributor to The Suburbanization of New York, who recalls how one friendly neighbor turned part of her loft into a children’s after-school theater and another made hers a tumbling studio. Both bootstrap play spaces are gone, replaced by a Gymboree Play & Music, a 700-outlet chain that originated in the San Francisco suburbs.

“The city’s always reinventing itself,” said Lenček-Inagaki, an actress who has since relocated to Los Angeles to live among the artist community TriBeCa has lost.

Much as she misses the New York of her youth, Lenček-Inagaki recognizes there are benefits to the city becoming a bit more like the suburbs. As a teenager she played soccer on the fields where Houston Street meets the East River. Before games she and her teammates would search the field and call the teacher if they found condoms or needles.